It made me sad in the middle of work when I found out David Lynch died. I said out loud in my cubicle “no..no” and even teared up. Nobody noticed or showed any signs that this mattered as I quivered with emotion with a headset on and my white button down long sleeve shirt tucked in.
It made me sad because a force had left us, whose bread and butter it was to investigate - and keep alive like a crackling electrical connection, the human moments that bind us, while on the surface, deranged characters would plot or seethe and innocent, tragic or even “off-beat” types would fall in love, commit murder and generally play out elements of wholesome Americana.
There was no “us vs them” in the world of Lynch, there was just “Lynchian,” an umbrella term that unified universal beings under an unknowable but potent…something. Some kind of presence that was either manmade or primordial or a mixture of both and in most ways that answer didn’t matter because a teenager was dead and the community was hurting.
He felt like a bright shining beacon in a storm of normal norms. His presence alone was a comfort, like the idea that him just being alive meant that others gravitating toward the weird, thoughtful life could use him as a strong example of why this is a fulfilling path to take, and find similar travelers along the way.
When I was in middle school I listened to a punk rock album recorded live where the singer references having a bad haircut like “Eraserhead” which I had never heard of or seen. But I did see the cover in the video store and knew that if a punk rock singer was referencing it live on a recorded album that it must be cool or interesting at least. The Simpsons would send me on this type of journey multiple times throughout life.
I liked David Lynch’s relationship with creativity, how he seemed to tap into a pulsing, pre-existing force like placing his hand in a clear stream to catch a passing fish. He seemed to do this from the perspective of an everyman without ever believing once that to be an everyman was the goal. It was an archetype to step out of I think.
I equated his relationship with Americana to be a lot like Pee Wee Herman’s and John Waters, two of my other favorites. That normalcy was deranged on its own. No tweaking necessary. The grinning neighbor’s white smile where teeth might crack or shoot out was the strangest thing.
Oddball kitsch could be a comfort.
I was in awe of what Lynch did. As a thinker I was naturally curious about understanding “it” - like an exercise, but similar to the otherworldly presence of the Beyond in Twin Peaks, I never ever wanted it fully named. That wasn’t the point. The reaching was the point or the traveling or the phantoms.
The point was the Being, the relationships or the living. Or the dying - a process all its own that brought out humanity like instinctual figures called to an ancient ritual. Makes me think of the Log Lady’s last scene where she has a final conversation with Deputy Hawk and he knows her well and cares about her as Margaret Lanterman and she speaks urgently to him and it all feels lonely and intimate.
I suppose I identified with David Lynch. I was a Boy Scout. I was raised Mormon, had Mormon ancestry that I could trace all the way back to Brigham Young himself (though admittedly it was through his very first “pre-Mormon” wife Miriam Works. Who in a strange turn of fate right this very moment, I just learned for the first time she and I shared the very same birthday. I’m not sure if this is “Lynchian,” but it is strange.
I identified with David Lynch, because he always seemed to be putting Americana into focus from an earnest standpoint, and in looking at it so earnestly, he revealed the strangeness and a strangeness inherent in life itself, probably.
He championed a weirdness in me that was an unnameable force fighting against the rubric of my attempted but doomed traditional upbringing that my family always fell short of not through vice but doubt or apathy.
When it was time to go on my cinephile journey the Lynch filmography was there with a whole big groaning factory space all to his namesake. And discovering his movies were bread crumbs to a bigger community of fellow weirdos who were not weird but actually more normal than the normies. What did these words even mean actually?
There were traditional tales of masculinity and melodramatic love triangles mixed with ancient nameless evils. I mostly liked how comedic he could be while being thrilling and grotesque like when Bobby Peru blows his own head off, or how Lynch let things just be odd without scapegoating a character. After all, “This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.”
He was an instrument that harnessed the ethereal like music and allowed me to be a type of device capable of receiving it.
I favored his atmospheric droning. I will internally refer to it as “industrial Lynch drone.” It is a version of room tone that feels proactive. It feels like a presence. It is soothing to me. I guess it’s Lynchian. I will miss knowing that his heart is beating out there. He is an idea now, but he was an idea then too.
Now he is a presence like sunlight or the fog through the trees on a mountain by a waterfall.